12 Essential PR KPIs to Track

The importance of data-driven PR can’t be overstated—it allows professionals to quantify their impact, justify budgets, and continuously improve their strategies. But knowing which metrics to stay on top of can be a challenge.

KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, guide teams towards achieving wider business goals, setting out quantifiable targets along the way to the final objective. Using the right metrics to measure PR success is vital to make sure you’re hitting those targets and heading in the right direction.

Source

So, let’s examine the PR KPIs that will help you understand the success of your PR campaigns, gain valuable insights, and make more informed decisions.

Media Outreach

Media outreach metrics are fundamental to assessing the impact of your PR efforts, so they should be included in every report.

Media mentions provide a quantitative measure of the amount of earned media your brand or campaign receives in various media outlets. Mention is the ideal tool for this, allowing you to gain complete visibility into daily online mentions of your brand from over 1 billion sources.

Share of voice (SOV) compares your media presence to that of competitors, offering insights into your market position, while message penetration analyzes how effectively your key messages are being communicated and adopted in media coverage. It’s also important to track the impact of partnerships here.

For example, one resale platform participated in 59 initiatives over a year, resulting in a total reach of 77.6 million people. By tracking these partnerships, the business can see just how impactful its efforts have been and how its attempts relate to monetary worth in terms of the coverage obtained through PR efforts.

Source

Social Media Engagement

Social media engagement tracks the level of interaction you see on all your social media platforms, whether it’s Instagram likes, mentions on Threads and X, or shares on Facebook.

It helps gauge audience interaction and ties into other metrics we’ll explore later, such as brand perception.

Follower growth is also worth monitoring. It indicates the expansion of your direct audience and hashtag usage, demonstrating organic conversation around your brand.

Some platforms don’t provide a way to evaluate total engagement, so depending on the tools you’re using to monitor these results, you may need to count likes and engagement metrics manually for reporting.

Subscriber Count

As the name suggests, this metric is the total number of people who have opted in to receive newsletters, updates, or content from your brand. It reflects your audiences’ interests and engagement with the content and communications your PR team is producing.

A strong email list is a fantastic tool for building your community and making sure your PR communications are landing in the inboxes or feeds of the right people, but also with the hope that it will convert those interested in your brand into paying customers.

If your subscriber count is growing, it’s a strong indicator that people are enjoying your content and want to consume more of it, so this is a good metric to have in your reports to show that you’re on the right track.

It will also, naturally, inform where you put your efforts moving forward and the type of content or messages you promote to attract like-minded people.

Most Active and Influential Contributors

Your most active contributors show the outlets and accounts that talk about your brand the most, whether mentioning the company itself or the products and services you offer.

Being aware of who these contributors are and engaging with them regularly strengthens those relationships so that their positive reviews and mentions of your business can then influence other people.

Similarly, your most influential contributors are the most powerful voices in your brand’s community and have the potential to really change people’s perceptions of your company.

This may not necessarily involve the outlets with the highest subscriber counts. However this is a good place to start, but it might be influencers with the power to set and alter trends or popular figures in your niche that people respect and value the opinion of.

Brand Perception

On the topic of brand perception, understanding audience sentiment and brand perception is crucial for gauging the qualitative impact of your PR efforts.

Sentiment analysis categorizes mentions as positive, negative, or neutral, providing an overview of public opinion, while brand reputation score measures your overall brand health.

You need to know how your audience perceives your business and brand so you can carry out damage control if necessary and plan your PR campaigns accordingly.

Message pull-through is also worth monitoring, as it shows how effectively your audience adopts and repeats key messages.

Customer feedback, surveys, and online mentions can provide direct insights into how your PR efforts shape public perception. These metrics help PR professionals understand their campaigns’ emotional and cognitive impact on the target audience.

For example, one leading workout brand has carved out a positive brand perception that’s been on the rise since 2010.

What sets them apart is the community-themed classes that draw in people looking for a connection with others without the intensity of other brands. The brand has focused on this notion when forging its brand perception.

Lead Generation and Conversion

While often associated with marketing, lead generation and conversion metrics are increasingly important in PR, especially for B2B companies running a PR campaign.

Conversion rates measure how effectively these leads turn into customers, while customer acquisition cost (CAC) helps assess the efficiency of PR in attracting new business. This KPI is essential for understanding how your PR strategy directly impacts the business’s broader goals.

Source

This is a relatively easy metric to track—simply divide the number of conversions, be it purchases or sign-ups, by the total number of leads generated by PR and then multiply by 100 for the percentage.

However, despite how easy this is to quantify, it should be monitored because it shows a direct correlation between PR work and business impact.

It’s also worth tracking the impact on the sales cycle, which examines how your initiatives and campaigns influence the length and success rate of the sales process. This will enable you to demonstrate your contribution to the company’s bottom line and align your efforts more closely with business objectives.

Web Statistics

Web traffic metrics refer to the number of visitors to your website, which indicates the reach and effectiveness of your PR efforts in driving audience engagement online.

Understanding how a website ranks on major search engines is vital in today’s online-first market, and PR professionals must know this.

After all, it’s one of the first places people will see your brand, so it’s directly linked to brand perception and audience engagement.

In addition to rankings and traffic figures, page views indicate that your brand is moving positively. You can gather these statistics using tools such as Google Analytics.

You need to know where your website traffic is coming from and the content receiving the most views to continue developing similar content and avoid wasting time pushing content and ideas that aren’t getting results.

If you neglect SEO and search analytics in your PR strategy, you could be leaving a lot of potential customers behind.

Getting over the learning curve that comes with understanding SEO is well worth the time to understand how traffic from sources like social media or backlinks are impacting brand perception.

Not all traffic channels will yield the same results, so PR teams should track how PR campaigns or press releases are performing to reach all corners of the Internet.

Share of Voice (SOV)

SOV is a metric for comparing your brand to others in your industry or niche.

It gives you a clear view of how much your brand dominates the conversation and can be a really useful data point for informing future PR campaigns and how you approach them.

SOV can be measured in several ways, from organic keywords and hashtags to impressions, revenue, and earned media mentions.

What’s important here is to note the quality of the reach.

Focus on strengthening your media relations with outlets and journalists to increase the chances of positive mentions in reports or articles. Actively engage with your target audience to participate in relevant conversations that will help you establish a good reputation and increase your share of voice.

Source

Influencer Relations

As influencer marketing becomes increasingly intertwined with PR, metrics for measuring these relationships are essential. Influencer engagement rate assesses how well an influencer’s audience interacts with your brand’s content.

Influencer-generated content performance measures the reach and impact of content created by influencers on your behalf.

Audience overlap and relevance also help you partner with influencers whose followers align with your target demographic. Influencer campaign ROI calculates the overall return on your influencer partnerships.

Engagement Types

How is your audience reacting when you share something or promote a certain idea, product, or service? Are they sharing your content, liking it, or leaving comments?

Knowing the types of engagement your brand receives is helpful in knowing which types of promotional content your brand should create to yield the best results and highest engagement, as well as what your audience likes most.

Regional Exposure

PR teams need to know where their media coverage is highest, from countries to cities and towns, because they will want to prioritize these areas to boost brand presence.

Similarly, in areas where the brand isn’t as well known and exposure is low, more effort needs to be made to boost brand awareness in these locations.

Tracking media mentions by location also helps you understand the share of voice and the potential reach your PR efforts are receiving. It gives you a better idea of what messages and stories resonate in different geographic markets so you can plan and position your PR strategies more effectively.

Event and Speaking Engagement

Events and speaking engagements remain important PR tactics, and specific metrics can help evaluate their success.

Attendance and participation rates, for example, provide basic measures of reach and interest, while social media buzz around events indicates the online impact and conversation generated.

Naturally, you also need to track lead generation from events to see what business potential was created through these activities. This metric will help you justify event budgets in the future and continuously enhance event strategies.

Using the Right Tools for KPI Tracking

A holistic approach to PR measurement involves considering all these metrics in context rather than focusing on any single PR KPI.

It’s crucial to align your chosen metrics with your business’s overall objectives to ensure that any PR efforts drive meaningful results for the organization.

Embracing data-driven insights enables PR industry professionals to continuously improve their strategies, demonstrate clear value to stakeholders, and elevate the role of public relations within the business.

It also helps you set benchmarks for future PR campaigns. With a clear goal to aim for, you can identify areas to improve and set realistic goals for the future.

The right tools make tracking these essential PR KPIs and metrics easier and more efficient. Media monitoring tools like Mention deliver the comprehensive data required to track brand mentions and how audiences interact with your brand, allowing you to quantify the impact of different campaigns and the ROI of your work.

This ensures you stay aligned with company-wide objectives and produce effective PR campaigns, justifying your investment in different resources and formats.